- From: fantasai <fantasai.lists@inkedblade.net>
- Date: Wed, 20 Jul 2005 02:58:27 -0400
Ian Hickson wrote: > On Tue, 19 Jul 2005, Olav Junker Kj?r wrote: > >>But the notion of conformance is still quite useful to authors and >>authoring tools. E.g. if a META-element without any attributes appears >>in a document, its clearly due to an oversight or a bug in some tool, so >>it would be useful to have a conformance checker or authoring tool flag >>this, even if a browsers will handle it somewhat gracefully (by ignoring >>it). Agreed. > I agree that we need to make conformance checking useful, of course. I > disagree that a blank <meta/> is necessarily a problem. Maybe the author > wanted to add some attributes dynamically later. Maybe he wants the DOM of > all his pages to be equivalent and at that point in his pages there simply > is no metadata to give. ... > The difficulty is in walking the fine line between useful and > over-constrained. For example, the fact that <ol></ol> is invalid in HTML4 > is a real problem. Agreed with the last paragraph. One way of drawing the line might be, does dropping this requirement result in a semantically-meaningful representation? An empty list represents an empty list. But a <meta> without a 'name', or a <link> without a 'href': these, per spec, represent nothing. They do not even provide any structural semantics as <div> and <span> do; the document has the same semantics as if the element did not exist. ~fantasai
Received on Tuesday, 19 July 2005 23:58:27 UTC